


Apotheosis

by callunavulgari



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hope, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Multi, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 05:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14490276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: Grief, a story told in three parts. Thor sees ghosts, Steve rebuilds, and Tony comes home. They all dream.





	1. Thor

**Author's Note:**

> Infinity War fucked me up. There are spoilers.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki comes to Thor in dreams, after.

Loki comes to Thor in dreams, after.

Wakanda mourns its King, mourns its people, and the Avengers mourn those that they’ve lost as well. They do not find rest, in the days after. They wander the halls, at a loss. Their purpose gone. Thor finds himself thinking that maybe he was lucky after all, that all those he loved were dead before he touched foot on Midgard.

He sleeps, on the third day. It is an uneasy sleep, full of ghosts. His people. Asgard. Father. Mother.

“Brother,” Loki whispers, and touches his cheek.

Thor tips his head into the touch. Loki’s fingers are cool against his cheek.

“Loki,” he replies, and opens his eyes.

The ceiling is grey. When he turns to look, the room is empty.

Thor sleeps again, on the fifth day. He has spent tireless hours assisting those that are left, rebuilding what they can, making a ledger of those lost. They help the little queen as best they can, and then they turn their gaze to the rest of the world. A world that howls its grief. There are huge memorials in the subway stations under New York, candles and crosses and an endless sea of photos with words plastered underneath each: Have you seen me?

Thor helps. And then he sleeps.

“Thor,” Loki says, and touches his cheek again. Thor turns to look at him, and this time, the dream allows it.

Loki is wearing soft cotton and his feet are bare. He leans over Thor on the bed, dark hair hanging in his face. When he sees Thor looking at him, he smiles. It’s a soft thing, quiet, and full of affection. Thor usually only sees this smile when Loki thinks that he is not looking.

“I am dreaming,” he says, because it must be said. He cannot go mad. Not yet. Not until they find Thanos.

Loki nods, his fingers stroking over the arch of Thor’s brow. “Yes.”

Thor sucks in a huge breath and lifts his hand from the bed. With a sigh, he slides it into Loki’s hair, cupping the back of his skull in order to pull him closer. Loki, watching him with a fond smile, lets him do it.

When Thor strokes the fragile skin at the nape of his neck, Loki’s eyes slip closed, his lip parting on a soft exhalation, a sigh, a breath. He tilts his head into the touch, and Thor catches his open mouth in a kiss.

It’s infuriatingly perfect, the touch of their two mouths together. Loki’s lips are warmer than the rest of him, and he melts into Thor with a shudder and a sigh, yielding to his touch in a way that he never had in life.

When the kiss is over, Thor tips their foreheads together, and breathes.

Already, he can feel himself waking.

“I miss you,” he whispers, because it’s true. He misses Loki, desperately. More than their father or their mother, more than their friends, more than all the people of Asgard. Loki was his in a way that no one else was.

“And I you,” Loki tells him, because it’s what Thor wishes to hear.

Thor lets out a noise like a sob, and crushes Loki to him tighter. He squeezes his eyes shut so hard that it hurts. “I cannot bear it.”

“Thor,” Loki breathes, and then he is gone. Thor wakes, and he is staring at a different ceiling, this one white and speckled rather than grey. There are tear tracks dried on his cheeks.

Thor helps.

And then, on the ninth day, he dreams again.

In the dream, Loki smiles at him. They’re on Asgard, in what were once Loki’s quarters. His body reclines loosely across a chaise that he had favored, one knee hooked over the arm. As Thor watches, he stretches - a languid, rippling motion that seems to start from his toes and end in his shoulders.

“Brother,” he says in welcome, his face open and content.

“You mean to torture me,” Thor says dully, licking his chapped lips.

Loki’s face crumples, the beatific smile going dim. The sunlight coming in through the windows behind him is all Asgard, golden and warm. If he touched Loki now, he thinks he would feel an echo of that warmth, the heat of it having seeped into Loki’s shoulders and back.

At last, Loki says, “You torture yourself, Thor.”

“Only because you are not here to do it for me,” Thor replies, taking a step forward as if pulled in by some great, magnetic force.

Loki sighs, his dangling leg swinging in idle irritation. “Perhaps I am here, truly. Would it be so hard to imagine that a piece of me lives on within you?”

“No,” Thor whispers, and feels a tear drip down his cheek. “It would not. I have always held you here, in my heart.”

Loki looks at him, all the mirth gone from his face. “You cradled my body when I was gone. You pulled me close and waited for that explosion. You were to die, with me. With our people. You meant to. The last of the Aesir.”

Thor reaches the chaise, and sinks to his knees before him. Loki touches him gently, cool fingertips tracing his face from temple to jaw.

“Tell me, brother,” Loki asks him softly. “When you woke, did it pain you? Did you look for me? For my corpse?”

“Yes,” Thor tells him. He had woken disoriented, surrounded by strangers, the memory of rage lighting him up from the inside out, the ghost of Loki’s touch still against him. He’d thought of vengeance, of a burial that he would never have, and he had hurt. He’d gone chasing after death, and hoped it would take him.

He’d told the rabbit that he had nothing left to lose. It turned out that he was wrong. There was always more left to lose.

He chokes on a sob, and Loki shushes him.

“You will do this, brother. I know you will.” The corners of Loki’s lips quirk upwards into an impossible smile. Perfect in its replication. “You and Stark, your Avengers. You will beat Thanos.”

Loki’s smile goes sadder, and he touches Thor the way that Thor used to touch him, a hand reaching out to clasp the hinge of Thor's jaw, thumb stroking his cheek. “You don’t know how to lose, Thor. You never did.”

“And if I can’t bring you back?”

Loki shrugs. “Then you dream of me. Whenever you think to miss me.”

Thor chokes on a watery laugh. “I will always be dreaming of you, then.”

One last touch. A kiss, light as a feather, first to his brow and then to his lips. A tear slips from Loki’s chin and lands on Thor’s cheek. Loki is still smiling, his eyes wet. “Then, I will welcome your company.”


	2. Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath, Steve rebuilds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are sexual relations between Pepper and Steve in this. It is implied that Tony, Pepper, and Steve have feelings for each other, and that Pepper and Tony have discussed this, but Tony is not present and thus was not technically there to give them his blessing. This is about grief, and how people deal with it, and the messy relationships between these characters. I do not choose to think of this as infidelity, especially because I'm currently writing Tony's chapter atm, but if you're iffy about it, feel free to skip this one.

In the aftermath, Steve rebuilds.

Shuri cries when Okoye tells her about her brother, deep wracking sobs that come from deep in the gut, until she’s hunched over and crumpled in on herself. In grief, she seems smaller than Steve has ever seen her.

Okoye weeps with her, silent tears that seem endless.

So much grief.

In New York, large chunks of the city are without power. Abandoned vehicles line the streets. People are rioting. Things are on fire. Everywhere he looks, people are crying. Screaming. They’re desperate for answers, and no one can give them any. Half the world has crumbled to ash, and nobody knows what to do.

He helps put some of the fires out. He sleeps. He grieves.

On the fifth day, Pepper Potts finds him in Central Park. She is wearing worn jeans and a t-shirt that he thinks might be Tony’s. There’s a smudge of dirt across her cheek and a cut above her eye.

She sits down next to him and offers him a bottle of water. Gratefully, he accepts it, gulping greedily.

When he looks at her, she’s staring off into the distance, dull eyed.

“I was supposed to get married next month,” she tells him.

He winces. “I’d heard.”

She takes a ragged breath, and lets it out all at once. She looks at him, and he isn’t surprised to find that they’re rimmed in red.

“Have you heard from him?” she asks in a trembling voice. Her hands are shaking in her lap. “Tony? Has anyone heard from him?”

He swallows, and gently, places a hand over hers.

“Oh,” she murmurs, and fresh tears fall from her eyes. She dashes them away quickly with a furious swipe of her fingers. “Oh. That’s- I guess I should have-”

“Pepper,” he says, carefully, because he’s never called her that. He’s met her less than a dozen times, and he’d been on his best behavior for each of them. Miss Potts. Ma’am. They’d never been close enough for him to take her up on her offer to call her otherwise.

She glances at him, and he can see the grief in her eyes. “Did you know,” she whispers, “that last week I watched my secretary disappear in front of my eyes?”

He swallows hard.

“She had two children. Both boys. They were in daycare when it happened.” Her breath hitches in her chest and she pulls inward, tucking her hands around her stomach. “We can’t find their father. They’re six and eight, and we can’t find their father.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she shakes her head in short, jerking motions.

“I don’t want you to be sorry, Steve,” she says sadly. “It wasn’t your fault. I just- god, Tony spent years preparing for this. Years that I spent waking up to a cold bed because he was downstairs ‘tinkering.’”

She laughs, a harsh sound. “He knew this was coming, and I kept telling him to leave it alone. To let it be. Let someone else save the world. God, I was so stupid.”

“No,” he says.

“Yes,” she hisses, and he can see where her nails are biting into her palms. “Tinkering. I called it tinkering. Like it was just a hobby. Like it didn’t matter.”

She turns to look at him again.

“I want him back, Steve,” she whispers, and this time, she lets the tears fall, hard and fast. Up from the gut, choking, desperate tears that make his chest ache in sympathy. He catches her up in his arms and pulls her close, tucking her head under his chin.

She smells like sweat, mostly, but underneath that, her hair smells sweet.

“I know,” he whispers, and closes his eyes. “I do too.”

 Steve dreams that night. He closes his eyes and it’s Bucky that he sees, falling and falling, snow and then ash. Then it’s Sam, and T'Challa, and Wanda, and Vision. He watches as half of the globe crumbles away, as the ocean floats off the jagged, broken edge of the world. It crystallizes and disappears into space.

A star burns bright overhead, and when it lands before him, it’s Tony. His body is still in the suit, it must be, but the suit is crumpled and broken. Steve lets out a little cry and goes to pull away the face plate, his hands blistering under the heat of the metal.

He lets out a little grunt and it comes free, revealing a spill of ash that, within moments, is lost to the wind.

Steve chokes on it, on the dust, and when he wakes, he is crying.

He has other dreams. In some of them, Bucky is there. He looks like he used to with the devil-may-care smile and the shorn hair. He wears a soldier’s uniform, and when he touches Steve, his hands seem huge because Steve is so very small.

He kisses Steve like that, big hands along the dip of his spine, pulling him in close, almost crushing. Steve likes it. His body remembers what it was like to be small, what it was like to be frail, to fear the winters because he never knew if he’d live to see spring. He remembers what it was like to kiss someone when like that, what it felt like to kiss _Bucky_ like that, the touches so light, as if Bucky had been afraid that he would break. Bucky never got the chance to touch him, after, when Steve was big. He's always wondered if it was just that they never had the chance, or if it was because Bucky had liked him better that way. When he was small.

Steve sighs and kisses Bucky back, goes up on tiptoes to do it, and when he opens his eyes, it isn’t Bucky that he’s kissing at all.

Tony smirks at him, and in it, Steve can almost see an echo of Bucky, that devil-may-care grin, cocky and so sure of himself. Tony leans in to kiss him again, and Steve wakes up.

He sees Pepper again, and they eat dinner in silence. There's the clink and scrape of silverware, the low hum of a television on in the next room, and beyond that, the hustle and bustle of the world outside this impossible glass castle that Tony built for them. Conversation doesn't seem to want to come.

She sucks in a breath when they’ve eaten their fill, and Steve politely offers to do the dishes.

She smiles at him, and says, “We’ll do them together.”

He washes, she dries. It doesn’t take long, because Pepper Potts isn’t the type of woman to have the time to cook regularly even if the world weren’t ending. They have their plates, silverware, wine glasses, and several serving spoons. The takeout containers have already been pitched into the garbage.

When they retire to the living room with their wine, Pepper sits too close to him. He can feel the heat of her against his arm, his thigh. It’s a nice, human feeling. Touch, and being touched.

They watch the television in silence for a time, the horrors unfolding across the world. Fathers and mothers and children and friends who never came back, people who never got to say goodbye, people who _did_ get to say goodbye.

Wordlessly, Pepper gets up and switches off the TV. She takes him by the hand and leads him upstairs, to her and Tony’s bedroom, and steps out of her dress.

He touches her with care, with reverence, kissing the gentle curve of her hips, the swell of her breasts, the dip of her throat. He pulls her to him, and when she lets him inside of her, she breathes out, a heavy, shaking sigh. Her chest heaves, and for a moment, he’s afraid that she might cry.

She doesn’t cry. Instead, she hooks her heels around his waist and urges him faster.

When it’s over, she lays with him, her head on his chest.

“Loving him is hard,” she tells him, and it doesn’t sound like an excuse. It’s a statement of fact. A friendly warning. One that, Steve realizes, is coming too late.

He licks his lips. “Yeah. I know.”

“It’s worth it, though,” she says, and yes, he knows that too.

Tony is alike both Bucky and Peggy in different ways. He has their stubborn ferocity, their fierce loyalty. He burns with the force of his personality, with all of that knowledge, a maelstrom of human heart and courage.

“He’ll come back,” Steve tells her, and for a moment she is quiet.

“He always does,” she admits softly, tracing circles around the center of his chest, just where an arc reactor would sit. “I’m just afraid of the day that he doesn’t.”


	3. Tony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I hoped that they would remember you,” Thanos says, his voice a crack of booming thunder in this place. “Will you remember them?”

They don’t talk on the way back. The space is quiet and cramped, the ship made more for one person than for two. Tony’s knees nudge up against the back of Nebula’s arm every once in a while, and she jerks away with a hiss and a whirred click, but never says a word.

The stars are beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful.

When they’ve exhausted what few rations they had, Nebula sighs and angrily admits, “We’re going to need to stop somewhere soon.”

Tony shrugs, idly watching the stars pass them by. His hands are shaking. Gritty with something that’s not sand.

“We’re going to need to steal a better ship if we have any hope of making it to your planet,” she tells him, punching something into the console. The back of her skull is two different shades of blue. It’s a shapely skull, but unwelcome at the moment. It isn’t the one that he wants to see.

Tony looks at her. “We?”

For a moment, she looks lost. Then she looks angry. “How else, exactly, were you planning on getting home?”

He looks away. “I wasn’t, really.”

Something whirs and clicks as she turns to look fully at him, her black eyes glinting with cold rage. A week ago, he would have paid good money to see what was under her hood. He’d all but cornered the market for robotics on earth, but she was something else all together. Cold, hard metal overlaid and entangled with very real muscle and sinew. A person, but machine too.

“You were going to give up?” she asks coolly, voice dripping with derision.

“No,” he says with a shrug. “I just.... wasn’t. For a bit.”

Nebula is quiet for a moment, the whole seething length of her body perfectly still. It hurts to look at her sometimes, like he can see the rage right under her skin. The loss. It makes him tired. Makes him feel.

“My sister wouldn’t let him win,” she says decisively. “Gamora- she wouldn’t. She ran once, but I think that she would fight now. That she would want me to fight.”

He sighs and shifts, letting his knee jostle her elbow more forcefully this time. She hisses at him, baring her teeth, and angrily turns her back to him.

“Look,” he tells her, his voice cracking down the middle. He keeps finding himself thinking about who’s still alive back home, if Pepper made it, Rhodey, Happy. Vision. Cap. Bruce. He almost thinks that it might be better, that it might hurt less if he _doesn’t_ look. If he never finds out. He feels gutted, like he’s bleeding out all over this ship, his feelings seeping into his clothes, his hair, into the ash on his hands that used to be Peter Parker. “I never said that I was going to let him win. I just-”

He cuts himself off with a frustrated noise, and turns to look at the stars again.

“It hurts,” she finishes, and he gives her a jerking nod. He can feel the loss in the back of his throat, thick, a pressure that’s going to strangle him if he lets it.

“Yeah,” he says. “It hurts.”

She tilts her head at him, considering. “That boy. Was he your son?”

Tony clenches his fists. The left one aches ferociously.

“No,” he says, and doesn’t bother to tell her more. She’s a stranger that’s sitting with him in a little spaceship at the end of the world. She’s lost people, and he has too. Peter’s too fresh a wound.

He sucks in a breath and watches as a spaceport of some kind starts to come into view. It’s a dim glowing orange light, brighter and bigger than the pinpricks of stars. He shifts forward a bit, until he’s hovering over her chair. She makes a scoffing noise at him, but doesn’t make a move to elbow him away.

“That where we’re going to steal our ship?” he asks as the light resolves into shapes - a structure unlike anything he’s ever seen.

She makes a quiet affirmative noise, and casts a glance at him over her shoulder.

“We will have to get you clothes.” She gives him an assessing glance, her eyes lingering over the dried blood staining his side. Her lip curls. “And a doctor.”

They get him a doctor, some clothes, and they steal a spaceship. It isn’t overly large, but it’s sleek, and gleams blue and black in the darkness, its wings like polished blades. He can see instantly why Nebula had liked it.

“It will take us days to reach Earth,” she tells him as she queues up commands. There are people shouting outside, banging on the windows. She pays them no mind. “You should sleep, for now.”

Tony raises an eyebrow at her. “Should I?”

She stops, and glares at him. “Would you rather me waste my time entertaining you, or should I fly the ship?”

He blinks at her, shifting in the new clothes. The fabric is a lot like leather, and he finds it clinging to him in uncomfortable places.

“You could let me work out how to fly the ship,” he offers, and she scoffs.

“You?” she sneers. “You would fly us into the nearest sun.”

“It can’t be too hard,” he says with a shrug. “I’d work it out.”

She turns her back to him. “You aren’t flying the ship.”

Tony sinks heavily into the chair next to her. His hands are still shaking, but at this point, he’s not sure if they’ll ever stop. Carefully, he tucks them between his thighs, where he can’t see them.

He’d washed, on the spaceport. Washed away the ash and dust, all the blood, and when he’d stepped out he still hadn’t felt clean. There had been people screaming and crying there too, ash and dust thick in the air. Nebula prowled through the hallways like she was impervious to it, Tony trailing behind her.

People were scared. Even here, lightyears away from home, people were dead and dying. Asking questions that didn’t have a hope of being answered.

“Sleep,” Nebula urges again in that sharp, vicious voice. “I won’t ask you again.”

The ship rises, and below, Tony watches the people fall away.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

Tony dreams.

He dreams the usual dream - space whales, the endless void of nothing that is space, alien armies, only now he has a face to go along with it. He said that Thanos had been in his head for six years, and he’d meant it.

The nightmares have been unending, horrible, nerve-wracking. He hasn’t slept well since monsters came through the sky all those years ago, the imprint of the Chitauri forces against that endless spread of black all but burned into his retinas.

He feared it, the cold, the black, and all it held. All that it still holds. Waiting in silence. Biding its time.

Thanos hovers in his peripherals, a huge silhouette that casts a shadow over the dreamscape. Tony doesn’t look for him, because he knows that Thanos will find him eventually. He always does.

Instead, he looks for familiar faces. For Pepper, and Rhodey, and Bruce.

For Steve.

He finds them all, alive and breathing, but when he touches them, they crumple to ash. He feels their dust on his fingertips, and he sucks in a sharp breath.

“Please,” he says to Steve, reaching.

Steve looks at him, his eyes hollow, haunted. Tony touches him, fingertips scraping along the sharp cut of his jaw, and for a moment, there is flesh there. Steve’s skin gives, indents under the pressure of his fingers, and for a moment, he hopes.

Then Steve crumbles away like the rest.

“I hoped that they would remember you,” Thanos says, his voice a crack of booming thunder in this place. “Will you remember them?”

“Yes,” Tony sobs. “Yes. Of course.”

“Good,” Thanos says, and stabs him through the chest.

When Tony wakes with a gasp, Nebula is watching him.

“You talk in your sleep,” she tells him, and then, “We’re almost there. You slept for ages.”

Tony licks his dry lips and sits up in his seat. He glances out at the stars, but doesn’t know them well enough to tell if anything is familiar. He feels the grief again, acutely, a searing pain that strikes him at the core. Peter would know the stars.

It’s another couple hours before Tony catches sight of Earth, just a small tiny ball of blue in the distance. He almost mistakes it for something else. A moon. Another planet. Fucking Neptune, he doesn’t know, but when it looms closer he can make out patchworks of green and white and brown.

“Your planet isn’t hideous,” Nebula tells him. “Congratulations.”

They land in New York, on the front lawn of the Avengers compound. For a moment, Tony worries that they’ll be shot, but no one comes. That’s worse.

The building is all but deserted, signs of life here and there - an untouched mug of coffee, an empty bowl of cereal sitting in the sink. There are weapons missing from the weapons locker.

“Quiet,” Nebula remarks, propping a hip up against the island. She prods at a box of Mini-Wheats, left open on the counter. “You sure your friends are here?”

“No,” Tony says, honestly, and goes for the television. It takes him a moment to find the right station, several moments of flipping mindlessly past death and destruction before he catches a flash of Thor’s cape.

“Your friends are rebuilding,” Nebula says, and takes a seat on the couch. “Bring them here. I’ll wait.”

Tony raises an eyebrow at her. “You aren’t coming?”

She shrugs and kicks her feet up onto the coffee table. “I dragged your ass this far. It’s your turn to do the heavy lifting.”

 

There’s a moment where he can’t decide who to call first.

Pepper, who’s expecting him. Who’s been waiting for a phone call for days, weeks, however long he’s even been gone. Time feels funny, like it doesn’t really exist anymore. Like they’re living in an unreality too horrible to be real.

Or should he call Steve? What would he say?

 _Avengers assemble,_ he thinks, wryly, and wonders how many of them is left.

Pepper, he thinks, and picks up the phone.

The phone rings for an impossibly long time, and then, just when he’s thinking it will go to voicemail, someone picks up.

“Tony?”

It’s not Pepper. Tony hasn’t heard Steve’s voice in two years, but it’s unmistakable. Concerned, wary. Real. He sucks in a ragged breath, a quick inhalation, grief and loss queueing up all over again, but even as the idea of Pepper being gone starts to form, he hears her voice in the background, tinny and small, but real.

“Is it him?” she’s asking, her voice a throaty rasp. She sounds like she’s been crying. “Steve, oh god, please tell me it’s him.”

“I don’t know,” he tells her, and then again, “Tony?”

“Yeah,” he rasps, and closes his eyes. “I’m here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those interested, my [main blog](http://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/) and my [writing blog](http://callunawrites.tumblr.com/)!


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